Healthcare (or health care if you’re a colonial) means different things to different people. Depending on where you live, your background and your income, it might be synonymous with either insurance or the treatment of illness — and in some cases, it can even mean the public health of a nation or zone.

It’s important to think about these three things as separate entities: despite prevailing culture, you can’t mix up health insurance with the actual treatment of illness — they can both exist, but must be independent of each other. Health insurance, in countries without publicly-funded systems, is simply the way health care is paid for. In countries with ‘universal coverage’ like the UK, health insurance is used to pay for private care, or ‘complementary medicine’ (i.e. new/weird science). Public health is the overarching effort to improve health through improved knowledge and awareness, such as eating five portions of vegetables a day, ‘got milk?’, and so on.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s tuck in.

Healthcare is vital in the most true sense of the word. Without it we would die, immediately in a blaze of flame, or in a laboriously drawn-out fashion — it doesn’t matter: health care stops us from dying. Healthcare is so vital (there’s that word again) that about 10% of a Western nation’s GDP — 10% of its entire income — is spent on it. Some would argue that’s a small price to pay, for longevity of life. By comparison, most nations spend between 2 and 4% of their GDP on military/defence, and education comes in at about 5-7% of a nation’s GDP. So, as you can see, and have no doubt heard from Obama, health care is the biggest human issue.

But it’s all a damn mess; a horrible void of misunderstanding and overspending. And it all derives from a ‘knowledge gap’, between the doctor and the patient. The same can be said for most professions, but with healthcare the distance is most significant. Even if you don’t know the basic fundamentals of household plumbing, or how data traverses the Internet, you can still sleep soundly at night. But what if you’ve just been told you have cancer? Or that you’re being treated with Interferon beta-1a? You get a little jumpy, a little nervous — because you might die.

If we’ve learnt anything about the human body in the last 100 years, it’s that we should fear the inevitable onrush of death. Somewhere along the line we made the switch from ‘the most rugged and tenacious mammal on the planet’ to ‘wuss’. We used to live — and die. Now there are many more steps on the meter: alive, stressed, ill, broken, comatose, dead — and thousands more slotted in between.

Something doesn’t make sense. Why are we more afraid of our health now than 100 years ago? I’m not saying no one cared about death back then — people certainly put a lot of effort into making sure things were left tidy, and that the relevant gods would receive them into the afterlife — but it was just part of living. I think it has something to do with knowledge, and thus certainty and confidence. If you’re brought up with the knowledge that you will die by the age of 60 and you will die if you mistreat your body, that’s some stable knowledge that you can operate with. You can go out and live life.

What do we know about life and death today? Do you know how long you will live for, or if the quality of your life is assured? If I eat this burger, will it shorten my life — does that even matter? Should I be worried about senility, or will biotechnology/biopharmacy save me from that feckless fate?

It’s pretty weird to be confused about your own mortality, eh? A long, healthy life is the single most desirable wish — yet it is the one thing we are most uncertain about! I want to tie this in to the downfall of faith/belief and the rescinded promise of eternal (after)life, but I’m not sure I can yet — but it would make sense that, up until the last century, death was just been a temporary setback… but now it’s personal. (I kid, I kid, but you get the idea.)

To fix this problem, we need to close the gap between bleeding-edge research, the doctors, and us. We have to know more about our bodies and what they’re capable of; education obviously ties in at this point. I think we’re regularly reminded, and amazed, by what humans are capable of and how resilient we are — but at the same time, we have never been more aware of just how defenceless we ultimately are. Back then, we just died. No one knew why, we just died.

Now we die of cancer, heart disease, sclerosis, embolism — all invisible, all able to pounce at any time with little or no warning. But they’ve always been there, just like gravity or hydrogen. If we want to live long and healthy lives, we must teach about healthcare in schools. We must learn more about the body than the knee bone’s connection to the thigh bone, more than veins and arteries — like ancient Rome and Athens, education must be contemporary and hot on the heels of research.

9 Comments

I tried to educate myself when I was waiting for my MRI scan, and ended up scaring myself witless – even though I’m a fairly well educated person with a scientific background. I’m not sure what the right answer is!

I think, somewhere along the line, with more knowledge and technology, we tried to CONQUER death. I feel like we keep trying to conquer it, but we’ve only succeeded in prolonging it, except for a few accidents and cases. When young people die now, it’s considered unnatural. When older people pass, it is their time.

Back in history, it was so much more prevalent, and it attacked everyone, regardless of age, race, status, sex. Health care, like most fundamental rights of life in the U.S., is a way to keep the classes in check. That is what the upper branches are worried about, because they want to keep the hierarchy in place. They want to decide who has the right to be a citizen, and who doesn’t. Discrimination is a foundation of a lot of policy here, because we place faith in our government, when government is made up of people, and people are inherently fallible. When people decide to try to make things more equal; those people are labeled as communists, as we continually throwback to the baby boomer years as some ideological state of life.

The baby boomer years, when women were at home being housewives, unemployment was a record low, segregation was still in place, everyone smoked too much and drank too much, and the nuclear family was an institution to be reckoned with. The baby boomer years, when white man was king, and nobody was contesting for his crown. When white male WWII veterans came home and were granted with homes from the government, white people started moving away from the city because they could afford it and started suburbia as we know it, and towns became more segregated based on race and class.

The big deal with health care is really about power and keeping the people at the bottom that they want there. That’s why health insurance practices are so discriminatory right now. Women get paid less, and their health insurance is more expensive. Bigger people, as undesirables in the United States, have more expensive health insurance. You can argue that women and bigger people both cost more to cover because they have more health issues, like ovaries and heart disease, but it comes down to the fact that the United States government is predominantly a white man environment, and they can cover themselves because they are well paid, and don’t have to worry the trials of the poor. They are putting “sin” taxes on stuff like soda and cigarettes as a way to keep the poor poorer. The people who mostly smoke and drink soda regularly in this country are blue collar workers (and college students.) It’s a free country as long as you pay for it, and all of this “racism is over” crap is just bullshit. Racial discrimination is just more subtle.

This is a sore issue for me because I currently can’t afford health insurance, but I can’t afford not to have it either. I’m trying to find a job, but things aren’t looking good, and I know a lot of people my age who just graduated from college in all of this mess, and are having to choose between rent, food, and health care. And people my age are the people who just got to vote for the first time in the presidential election in 2008, and people my age are the ones who were taxed for more interest on their college loans, putting us more in debt, and in the worst economic turn since the Depression. My university hosted a career fair as “practice” because nobody was hiring. It was and is ridiculous, and just having an undergrad college degree doesn’t mean much here anymore.

Yeah, isn’t it strange, the things we actually learn. Imagine if schools taught people things like ‘how to stay healthy’ and ‘what your body does’ and practical things such as ‘doing your taxes’ … I would love to learn more about the body. It just seems like a million coincidences going on at once inside each of us that somehow equals a living being.

If that’s what you got out of it, Hez, I think you need to re-read it…! I think death used to be part of living. Now it’s something that must be avoided at all costs. Somewhere that change was made — and I don’t think it was a great change. But now that we’re there, we have to make the most of it…!

Thanks for the link, Rachel. It was most informative I’ll email you (again!), re: Faroes.

Chiefy, I think the problem is we don’t know all that much about our body. Or we do, in a physiological sense — thigh bone, knee bone, muscles, etc. But we’re into hormones and synapses and neurons now — and our understanding of those is fairly medieval still. We know _something_ happens, just not WHY it happens. Dangerous ground — we must prod some more!

HELLO KRISTI!

I think that’s what they call ‘passionate’. I was reading something on representation in the US Senate just the other day. There’s only ever been 37 female senators, 17 of which are currently serving.

Imagine a senate that was elected from demographics — white women would have the largest number of senators (and white men next, admittedly). Or you could split the senate based on income — 1 person representing the top earners, but most would be representing the baby boomers (30 or so).

Problem is, that kind of reform is controlled by the same people, making it almost impossible. Politics

I think educating people about medicine, illness and healthcare is extremely important. Having worked in health insurance and now at a very, very large pharmaceutical, I am still astounded at the lack of knowledge in the general populous.

Perhaps I am biased, because I have an interest, but I find it fascinating to know how and why medicine works.

One of the problems (I’ve mentioned before), is that we made all of our major advances in medicines between 1970 and 2000. There isn’t a huge amount to really ‘discover’ as it were. Because of this, the focus seems to switch to the underlying causes of illness and managing them. It’s accepted, for the time being, that we won’t be able to cure a lot of illness, but they are wholly managed with ease.

Perhaps this is a reason people are afraid? Or rather, perhaps they are not afraid at all? Is it the fact is that there is a good chance that many illnesses can be managed to the point life expectancy is not dented?

Maybe.

I’d personally still like to know what’s going wrong with me either way.

This is kind of a random tangent but I’ve always wondered if you are supposed to treat an illness to begin with. So if you get cancer…does this mean it’s your time to die and this is how it’ll happen? And by fighting the cancer, seeking treatment, etc…you are really fighting God’s will? Is it selfish to want to live? Is it selfish to prolong your life?? Makes me wonder, that’s all.

I don’t want to get into God/gods/fate, but there is something to be said for evolution — there is no ‘survival of the fittest’ any more, not really.

But that’s only really a problem if medicine doesn’t improve at a rate fast enough to vanquish whatever genetic weaknesses we propagate

Hey JACK –

I think (but I’m not certain, because it’s early days for such thoughts) that people basically fall into two camps — those that are interested, and those that are not. Both involve feedback loops, so interested people become MORE interested. Ignorant (non-interested) people become more ignorant.

There’s never been a better time to be interested in the world, and ourselves. The amount of KNOWLEDGE is insane! It’d be nice to get people onto the right foot at a young age, though